An event organised by myself and Thom van Dooren from the University of New South Wales. To be held at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 2-4 December 2014 While the fear of capricious immortals living high atop Mount Olympus may have waned, the current age of the Anthropocene appears to have brought with it insistent demands for us mere mortals to engage with unpredictable and dangerous beings that wield power over life itself. Plastics, radioactive waste, fossil fuels and species extinctions have interpellated us into unfathomably vast futures and deep pasts, with their effects promising to circulate through air, water, rock and flesh for untold millions of years. Human time, geological time and a host of other temporal frames and possibilities confront each other in new ways, with little understanding on our part of how to find calibrations that might allow a reconciliation between them (Hatley; Chakrabarty; Bastian; Metcalf and van Dooren). One consequence is that relationships between life and death, creation and decay have become uncanny; no longer entailing what was once taken for granted. The unravelling of inter-generational and inter-species relationships in the current mass extinction event shifts death from being a partner to life toward the ‘double death’ that amplifies mortality until it overruns life altogether (Rose). While at the same time, the finitude of acts of creation, evoked so clearly in Shelley’s Ozymandias, is no longer as certain as it might once have been. Instead, in specific, but crucial contexts, it is not the dissipation and silencing of our creative and technical works that is feared, but the threat that they might circulate endlessly (Masco; Morton). The aim of this symposium, then, is to explore the shifting relationships between time, mortality and finitude in the context of the Anthropocene. Find out more and submit an abstract. One of the aims of the Temporal Belongings project is to respond to the lack of research available on the interconnection between time and community. As part of this, our AHRC project from 2012 included funding to develop an interview series that would provide new materials for this research area. After a fair few delays I'm now happy to announce that we have started publishing our interviews on the Temporal Belongings website. Our most recent (the third in the series) is available online from today. I speak with Alison Gilchrist, an independent consultant and author of The Well-Connected Community, which explores a networking/systems theory model of community development. You can read this and previous interviews in the series here. A new post about the More-than-human Participatory Research project is now up on the AHRC Connected Communities blog: Having to put on a protective suit to meet up with potential new research partners doesn’t seem to bode at all well, but it was what myself and a team of other researchers found ourselves doing in May last year, as part of a Connected Communities project that focused on co-designed research. This particular workshop explored the possibility of doing participatory action research with bees, but over the course of the year we pretended to be dogs and underwent clicker training, we went wild swimming and also talked to trees. Our aim was to test out a variety of co-design methods to see what happened when you tried to extend them to include non- humans. Back in 2011 the AHRC's Connected Communities programme funded a number of research reviews and scoping studies which looked at the question of community from a variety of angles. During my PhD I had found it quite difficult to find material that looked specifically at the relationship between concepts of time and concepts of community and so was keen to scope out what might be available across the wider multi-disciplinary literature. So it was really exciting to get some funding to focus on this and even more exciting to see the results now published with Time and Society. You can find out more about the project, including links to the full bibliography developed as part of the study on the Temporal Belongings website. The film from our final workshop of the more-than-human participatory research project is now available. Our water workshop took place on the 1-2 of October at/on/in the River Torridge. We worked with artist Antony Lyons and members from the North Devon Biosphere Reserve and the Devon Wildlife Trust to explore whether the recent Connected Communities-funded Ethical Guidelines for Community-Based Participatory Research might be extended to working with non-humans, specifically water. Thanks to our film-maker Marietta Galazka.
Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? The Slow Movement often comes up when I talk to people about the Sustaining Time project. It’s a nice clear way of explaining why you might want to think about time as part of developing more sustainable forms of economics. Slow Food, for example, suggests that a sustainable food system would need to use a very different time to the one guiding industrial agriculture. And of course the slow movement hasn’t stopped there but has been moving into a whole range of different areas, including into research with ‘slow science’ and ‘slow scholarship’ gaining more attention. So I have very much been looking forward to attending the Slow University II seminar, which was held in Durham last week, and included Carl Honoré and Chris Watson as speakers. It seemed like a great opportunity to explore the 'sustaining time of research'. But throughout the event, I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy about the way the Slow ethos was being deployed, particularly in Carl's presentation, and I wanted to explore some of the reasons here. Carl Honoré has been writing about the Slow Movement for some time now and many people at the event had brought along their copy of In Praise of Slow. His presentation covered similar themes to this book, including his own epiphany over needing to slow down when he realised he was constantly rushing through story-time with his son. He also explored a number of examples of the way the slow ethos is showing up in the most unlikely of places including Google’s 20 percent time project, Ariana Huffington’s effort to redefine success with the Third Metric and Jeff Bezos instituting 30 minutes of silent reading before meetings at Amazon. If these businesses could recognise the benefits of Slow why not the university? And so Carl offered three suggestions for what proponent’s of a Slow University might want to focus on:
The question of who is Slow for? was asked in a couple of reflections on the first Slow University seminar and, I think, continued to be a prominent question at this event. It is a crucial question, because as Sarah Sharma argues in her recent book In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics “capital invests in certain temporalities - that is, capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve the dominant temporality” (139). In each of the three large organisations mentioned above, for example, it is very clear that Slow is only for some. As Andrew Norman Wilson’s contribution to FACT’s Time & Motion exhibition uncovers, Google’s used of colour-coded badges determines how much access an employee has to self-directed work time and its time-saving infrastructure of free shuttle buses, meals, haircuts etc. Ariana Huffington has come under regular criticism for her business model based on the free labour of others, including masseurs. And even Carl noted the hellish conditions suffered by workers in Amazon’s ‘fulfilment centres’ (see also my post on the time of Amazon). When I asked about these discrepancies in the implementation of the slow ethos, Carl suggested that the model could be seen as a kind of Trojan horse that has the ability to transform organisations from the inside once it has found an initial foothold. Perhaps he will be proven to be correct, but part of me wondered whether it might not be the other way around. Was neo-liberal capitalism instead turning slow to its own ends, adding slow-washing to its stable of methods that already included green and white-washing? The benefits of Slow were almost completely described in terms of its ability to make you a better worker. Far from being ‘the opposite of a productivity ninja’ as was suggested at the beginning of the seminar, 'slow' seemed to equal 'productive'. For example, Carl talked about the ‘delicious paradox of slow’ where working slow actually allowed you to work faster, producing more than someone caught in a harried, unfocused rush. Described in this way it didn’t seem that the ethos of Slow was operating as a critique of capitalist temporalities of production but might instead be one of its latest incarnations. A core aim for the seminar was to find ways of supporting ‘ethical scholarship for the common good’ through recalibrating the time of the academy. But the focus on individualised experiences of speed and pressure, which seem to dominate the literature on the Slow ethos, suggest that it might have capitulated too easily to what Sharma describes as the “expectation that everyone must become an entrepreneur of time control” (138), where we invent and implement our individualised techniques of slowing down. Such an approach fails to deal with the uneven and unequal ways our time is intertwined with others and thus to confront the “new forms of vulnerability [that] are necessitated by the production of temporal novelties or resistances to speed” (150). Perhaps the core question then isn’t how can the university slow down, but how might it find ways of supporting ‘ethical times for the common good’. Reference: Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in quite a few different funded projects. I’ve been exploring clocks, local food, more-than-human participation, transition towns and more. Now that most of these have come to an end, I’ve got more time to focus on writing up the results of these projects and sharing them more widely. I had been looking forward to this part of the research process, but as soon as it arrived the familiar anxieties around writing came flooding back. So just before Christmas I thought it might be worth reviewing my writing process to see whether I could incorporate any new methods. I’d done a lot of this while I was writing up my Ph.D. (two of my favourites here and here) and this had helped me get a lot more writing done. But I still thought of writing as a painful process where every word was written in blood. When I came across Robert Boice’s claim in Professors as Writers that writing could be painless, and even enjoyable, it seemed like a dream. But recently I put some of his ideas into practice and was astonished to find myself writing a 5,000 word paper over three days, while also doing a course from 9-5 each day. Most of the time the writing was pretty painless and as I went along I even started to enjoy it. So I thought I’d share some of what I tried and why it seems to make such a difference. What stood out for me in Boice’s guide is the way he brings spontaneous writing together with the outlining and structuring process. He suggests that when starting a piece of writing, first spend between ten minutes and an hour writing about your topic. Don't worry about structure or getting anything perfect. Just write. The main aim is to get your ideas down on paper. Once you’ve done this, review what you’ve written and make a note of the key points, clustering them around a few main themes. You can then sort out these clusters into a logical structure that will then serve as an initial outline for your next draft. Repeat this process for each of the sections you’ve highlighted in your outline until you have your first full rough draft. Usually when write I sit staring at the same few sentences, trying to work out the right way to begin. Often I furiously delete them when I realise that they won’t flow into what I need to write next. But using spontaneous writing I could set aside all those anxieties about getting things in the right order and just write everything down. I trusted that I would go back through it all later and sort it out them. It felt lovely to be able to delegate that task to my future self and just get on with getting my ideas out on paper. This spontaneous writing tended to be quite conversational at first. I wrote about how I was feeling and what other things I was worrying about, before getting down to the specific topic at hand. This meant that I wrote a lot more than I needed. For example, I wrote 1200 words for an introductory paragraph that ended up being 300. But even with this ‘wastage’ I still wrote the whole thing more quickly and easily than I ever had before. I wondered whether this self talk was a necessary part of getting into the swing of things. Perhaps a bit like the way people usually spend some time chatting before getting to the main reason for their meeting. Maybe I need to observe these social niceties even with myself. Going onto the next stage of outlining was pretty much a revelation. I hadn't ever used an outline in the past, apart from when I was forced to in high school. It didn’t make sense to me to outline when I needed to write to figure out what I wanted to say. But using Boice’s method (and my new favourite programme Scapple) I ended up with a nice clear outline for the whole paper and a good sense of where each section was headed. I was surprised at how complicated the outline was. The implication was that in every previous piece of writing, I’d been doing this hard work of figuring out the structure of my paper at the same time as writing the first draft. No wonder I had always found writing so painful. During my Ph.D. I got much more used to the idea that writing was a craft, rather than an innate ability bestowed on the few. I believed I could learn to be more disciplined or have better technical skills. But what this process showed me was that I hadn’t extended the idea of writing-as-craft to the possibility that you could also learn to write in a way that was enjoyable and relatively anxiety-free. I'm not there yet, but a least now it seems a little less like a dream and more like something I might come to learn. Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? It’s been a little while now since we’ve put up a new post on this project and I can’t help but feel the irony of not having enough time to devote to a project that is exploring the possibility of developing more sustainable relationships to time. But as perhaps many others have found, your projects never really forget about you. They keep calling to you, cutting through all your busyness and eventually reeling you back in. So to get back into the swing of things, I wanted to revisit some of the core questions that first inspired the project. Starting off with the most obvious perhaps: Why might a focus on time be important for understanding how to shift to more sustainable economies? The perfect storm of multiple crises, including climate change, the peaking in supply of a whole range of key resources, as well as the astounding inequality fostered by current economic systems, have turned many towards developing and implementing alternative approaches. Challenging the philosophical basis of conventional economic theories has been an explicit aspect of this. As a result, the dominant paradigms of neoclassical economics are, at best, seen as being comprised of naive assumptions that fail to capture the complexity of human interdependencies on each other and on the environment. All around us, the dominant stories of how people interact with each other and the kinds of incentives and rewards they respond to are shifting. Instead of competitive self-interested units, we are more generous, more co-operative and more complex than main-stream economists give us credit for. The structure and characteristics of the web woven between the human and non-human, between the biological, the mineral and the elemental are being questioned and described in new ways. Gift-based economies, the new commons, cooperation, abundance instead of scarcity and distributed networks are just a few examples. How might time fit into this then? If time is just an objective flow that we measure, then it has about as much to do with economics as π (pi) does. It’s an unchangeable constant that we just need to live with. But what if this story about time is as much of a distortion as the story about ‘economic man’? What if time is also more complex, more interconnected and more dependent on social webs than we’re usually taught? That like the maps that tell us stories about space, our clocks are not simply telling us ‘the time’ but are telling stories about time that are cultural, political and partial? What if time is tied to our webs of relations in such a way that when these webs change so does time? There is already research that suggests that broadly speaking different economic systems seem to be associated with different approaches to time. For example, pre-industrial societies with task oriented time, industrial capitalism with an intensification of clock-time and late capitalism with speed and acceleration. And if we look for further clues within alternative economics, new sustainable times come tantalisingly into view. Steady-state futures or degrowth displace stories of the progressive arrow of time. Movements like Slow Food, Permaculture or Transition are making deliberate attempts to redesign everyday life around slower tempos and complexity-based models of social change. This suggests that social change doesn’t only happen in time, but happens through changes to time itself. The aim of this project then is try see if we can make some of these shifts in time more visible and more intelligible. But in going about this, we are making the following assumptions which make things more complicated:
Professor Graham Crow and his team on the Imagine: Connecting Communities through Research project have funding for two PhD's starting in April 2014. I'll be co-supervisor on one of these which focuses on time and community.
To find out more, including how to apply go to http://www.imaginecommunity.org.uk/node/12 |
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